Savvis, a CenturyLink company (CTL) and provider of cloud infrastructure and hosted IT solutions for businesses, is opening a new data center in Minneapolis- St. Paul area in spring 2014.

The new data center supports 4.8 megawatts of IT load on 100,000 square feet of raised floor space and will open with an initial 1.2 megawatts and 13,000 square feet of raised floor space.

MN2 will serve as the Minneapolis area’s first multitenant Tier III data center to receive certification from both the Uptime Institute and the U.S. Green Building Institute’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design.

The Twin Cities area is a hub of activity to retailers, consumer brands, healthcare and media companies . The data center will provide them with access to advanced collocation, cloud and managed hosting services, Savvis said.

The data center project was handled by Compass Datacenters, which will develop the data center on 10 acres of property it owns in Shakopee, Minn., a Minneapolis suburb, and lease the facility to Savvis.

Savvis operates more than 50 data centers worldwide. It already has a data center in the Minneapolis-St. Paul region. MP2 will provide clients with free access to Savvis ClientConnect, an online gateway for businesses to expand their capabilities by locating, connecting and sharing services with other businesses residing across Savvis’ global data center footprint.

“As we expand our data center footprint around the world, we understand the urgency in the Twin Cities area for flexible and reliable IT solutions,” said David Meredith, senior vice president and general manager, Savvis.

“Working with Compass, we’ve set a competitive timeline for delivering carrier diversity, interconnectivity and cloud services at pace with market demands,” Meredith added.